So you agree. The Next-Gen Cell will be out not to far away from now and be VERY powerful. Of course Cell is general purpose. But They took an approach different from the standard Multicore. Todays Multicore CPU's like Phenom and Core i7 are only really used on servers (Opteron, Xeon). The General Purpose Applications are just not much multithreaded. So using the complete Cores requires many users. Games, Visuals, Simulation do not really need GP Operations, but just raw compute power and often this calculations are naturally parallel. So even having 4 cores with SMT, gives you just 8 threads with all the fucking overhead of Cache coherency etc. That is very the GPU jump in, implizit parallel, just working on data streams. 800 Unified Shaders, which are 800 spezialized CPU's. Cell was first on the market to combine these 2 ideas. Use GP CPU where is lots of different things to do and much brain involved, but not much parallel and use high speed number cruncher which offer more intelligence than GPU Streamprocessors. Fuse it together with a high-speed bus and VOILA.
Cell is not the thing to run Word faster than a Core i7 or Phenom. First of all, Cell is an in order CPU design. It is not done to run Word and Excel and Internet Explorer in Parallel.
But Cell is at his best where you have a single Lead application with tons of things to calculate and to synchronize. The PPU's are the brain spending energy to organize the slaves, doing the management work. The SPU's are incredible efficient workers without much brain, but incredibly fast at small jobs (like the Shadersprogramm in GPU).
How do you want to use fully the 3 Cores in the XBOX360 CPU on ONE application? Even if you are threading, most part of the CPU logic is just dead!
Cell has a much more intelligent approach. SPE's are small, because they do not have OOE Units, Fetcher, Decoders, Branch predictors and all this other stuff to run multiple applications at the same time fast.
But the Future Cell, would also match the AMD-INTEL fraction on this part, it does not today, because it is already 4 years old and followed another approach.
AMD and INTEL are trying to go this way in future, because multiplying HUGE Full COREs is a waste of space and money.
Like Cars, the future will become Hybrid.
Software is like Sex, it is better when it is free!
